Saturday, October 17, 2015

How to Get a Faculty Position II

In the present post, I will deal with point 2 – succeeding in the interview. Your CV has gotten you the interview but now an entirely different set of skills comes into play. My advice here
will boil down to a couple of general points, each with several supporting
arguments. Although I expect my suggestions will hold in most instances, it is important to remember that jobs/departments/committees vary just as much as do individual people, and so you might need to adjust your strategy to suit the situation.

The key starting point is to realize that the department is not hiring your CV, they are hiring you. They
have already determined that your CV is sufficient for you to be a member of
their faculty; now they essentially throw out the CV and judge you based on
your performance during the interview. As a result, someone who just squeaked in as
the last person on the short list after a bunch of folks with more impressive
CVs now has an almost equal chance of actually getting hired. In fact, people in such a position sometimes have an advantage because opinions depend on expectations.
Someone with a huge CV comes with huge expectations during the interview and,
if they don’t blow folks away, they can seem disappointing. By contrast,
someone with only a decent CV can blow folks away with a good performance during the
interview. So how to succeed during the interview? Unlike my previous
post where most things were rather obvious, I will hopefully now have some novel and
surprising things to say.

The hiring committee
wants to see a colleague

Young scientists seeking their first faculty position
can sometimes interact with professors as though they are still students. That
is, they can be deferential rather than assertive, shy rather than bold,
intimidated rather than confident, and so on. Acting in this manner can give a strong
negative impression as it really does make you seem like a graduate student,
which no committee is going to hire. Instead, the people you meet, whether the
committee, other faculty members, or students, really want to envision you as
though you are already a professor, which is the role they are hiring you for.
So, how to do this without seeming arrogant or over-confident?

Talk. If you are too quiet, it will come off as
though you aren’t engaging and sometimes as though you don’t have much going on
upstairs. Your CV may have all sorts of outstanding papers that show you (or your supervisor) are really smart, and it may seem clear that you will publish lots of papers once hired; but
the committee is not hiring your papers – they are hiring you. Being a member of a
department is so much more than the papers you produce – it is also how you interact
with colleagues, how you interact with students, how you collaborate, how you
hang out, and so on. In fact, some faculty members who are very successful
with publications nevertheless come to be viewed by their fellow faculty as bad
hires because of their arrogance or indifference or disengagement or whatever. What
the hiring committee and everyone else wants to see is a nice, engaging, and
challenging EQUAL (at least in North America) during the interview. Of course, you also don’t want to talk too
much. That is, don’t cut folks off when they are talking (unless you can’t get
a word in otherwise) and don’t talk just to make noise (say something
interesting). This can be very challenging and exhausting and, as I can attest from personal experience,
can lead one to say things that come out wrong – a trap that I fell into during
at least one interview.

By Kerry Soper.

Prepare well but don’t look like you over-prepared.
It is frequently suggested that folks going to an interview should know a lot
about everyone’s research in the department, including having read some of their
papers. This advice is certainly fine at face value BUT it can’t look like you have done this specifically for the interview.
Instead, it should seem like you knew something about everyone’s research just
as a matter of course in your normal research activities before getting the
interview. Two elements of psychology come into play here. First, it can’t
look like you are desperate for the job. If you are, then it will seem like you
need the department more than it needs you, which is unlikely to inspire
enthusiasm for your hiring. Instead, you want to make it seem like you are very interested but that you have other (implied) options that make you relaxed
about whether or not you actually get the job. If this is done well, it can lead the committee subtly to the feeling that the department
needs you more than the reverse, which makes you more desirable as a hire.
Second, faculty members want to think that you knew about their work outside of the
desire to get the job. That is, if you read their work only in preparation for
the interview, then you didn’t really know about it otherwise. However, if you knew their work independent of the interview, then it makes you seem
widely read and generally knowledgeable. Perhaps the best way to walk this tightrope is to explicitly refer to the person’s work only after they first mention it. You can facilitate this sequence by asking “So, what projects are you developing now?” Then, as they talk about
their projects, you can interject a comment or two that makes it clear you know earlier
aspects of their work.

By Kerry Soper.

Engage in social activities. I have also seen it suggested that, when asked in an interview if you want do something (go for a beer, have
a coffee, see a local attraction), you should just say yes! I generally agree with this point but with some additional nuances. Many faculty have other departmental members
as their best friends and members of their social circle. Thus, they
are often consciously or unconsciously hoping that you – the interviewee – will also become a friend beyond the necessary work interactions. They want to imagine you hanging out with them and
engaging in sporting activities or clubs or poker nights or garage bands, or
whatever. They want to envision a causal, relaxed friend as well as an
intellectual colleague - and participating in social activities really helps. Many people who have not yet had a faculty
position, think that faculty spend all their time talking about and debating
science. While such debates are indeed frequent, much of the time faculty talk
about other stuff (music, sports, politics, etc.), even at work; so it is great
if you are comfortable doing same. These informal “fun times” during an interview can be a
great way to talk about your hobbies (hopefully following naturally
from other aspects of the conversation), weigh in on a political issue, or
refer to the latest social media scandal. These relaxed interactions will make
you seem sociable, which will help people to see
the sort of value-added colleague they would love to have.

Of course, you also don’t
want to project yourself as someone you aren’t. Most obviously, you shouldn’t
drink if you aren't comfortable with it. In addition,
you should avoid situations that encourage inappropriate comments or
discussions about race, religion, sex, or other topics that can be insulting or
uncomfortable. Moreover, if you receive comments of this sort during the interview,
you should make sure to tell the department chair or someone higher up.
Situations that make you personally uncomfortable or intimated should not be tolerated
or allowed to pass.

In addition to the above “I am already your colleague” feel
that you want to project, the most critical aspect of your interview (at least for a research-focused position) is your research
presentation. If you give a bad talk, you are toast. If you give a great talk,
you can rise above other candidates even with better CVs. In fact, you really must give a great talk. It
not only casts your research in the best possible light in the way you want it
to be viewed, but it also indirectly shows your teaching ability and how likely
you are to be interactive and engaging as a colleague. So how to do it?

Follow the baby-werewolf-silver bullet approach to structuring
your talk and/or elements within your talk. I have written a previous blog on this topic.

Link your work to general theory. Following from the above,
the baby should be presented in a very general way. Importantly, the baby/werewolf is not
your study system or your experimental approach, at least not usually. (Instead, your study
system or experimental approach is the silver bullet.) The baby/werewolf is instead some general theory or question that is of interest to many people, presented
independently of your study system and in explicit reference to formal theory
or meta-analytic results or famous previous studies. You want everyone in the
audience thinking “Yes, that is an important problem that needs to be solved if
we are truly understand the way the world works.” Then you want them thinking “Yes,
that is a great way to address that problem.”

Don’t oversimplify. When presenting to a general department, the temptation can be to “make it understandable to
everyone.” While this is a laudable goal, you really can’t water down your research
or it will simply seem trivial to anyone that actually knows something about it.
You need to show your data, not just the model fits. You need to specifically
mention the statistical models you used. You need to actually describe the
experiments. Importantly, however, you also need to explain your work in
a way that even non-specialists can grasp the key elements and their importance and suitability. Perhaps the best way is
to explain things twice: once the technically appropriate way and once
the simple way.

Don’t describe too many projects. Hiring committees
generally want to see someone who is going to be a world expert in some particular
topic, not a dilettante who jumps from one random project to another. Thus, you
want to present an integrated and multi-faceted approach to
a particular important question (baby/werewolf) in which your work has the potential
to be world-altering, paradigm-shifting, game-changing, and all those sorts of
things your letter writers have said about you but which you can't explicitly
state yourself. Of course, some people really do work
on several entirely different topics that are not closely related to each other. In such cases, I still generally suggest focusing on only one of the topics in your talk, unless you have a clear expectation that some of the audience is
specifically interested in one aspect of your work and some other segment of the audience is
specifically interested in the other aspect. In such cases, you can present both but you need to explain why you are doing so.

Talk about the work you will do next. At the end of
your talk, describe some of the projects (but not too many) that you will do
when you are hired. These would ideally be logical – but not trivial – extensions
of what you have already been doing. You don’t want to go into too much detail
about experimental design as it can leave you open to criticism about things you haven't even done yet; but you
should at least make it clear that you have an idea of what you will do next
and how you will achieve it. As a more specific example, many people in my fields
of ecology and evolution say they are going to use Next-Gen Sequencing methods.
Nearly everyone says this even if they have no experience with it and no clear
reason why it is an important next step for their research. As a result, it can
seem like you have methods-envy and are saying something that you think folks
want to hear just because they want to hear it. If you are going to say that
you are going the genomics (or equivalent) route, then you need to have a clear
reason why it is necessary and important. That is, the genomics must be the silver bullet
that is clearly necessary to kill the werewolf. It can’t
simply be something you are doing because you think folks are expecting it or
because “we need a complete picture of what is happening.”

Don’t say “that’s a great question”. By way of
illustration, I will relate a personal anecdote. When I was answering
questions during an interview for a faculty position in 2000, I said for the
first question That is a great question. Then I paused and said out loud (as it was crossing my brain in real time) Why do we always say that before questions?If we say it for everything, then it
means nothing; that, in fact, no questions are great.And, if you don’t say it for one question, does that mean the question
is not great? The audience looked amused or at least bemused. Then I went
on to answer the question. I was still mulling over what I had said as the next question was being asked, and so I responded histrionically That is an OUTSTANDING question. This time some folks in the audience actually laughed out loud. Then I answered the
question. Then, at the start of my response to the third question, I said That is a really awful question. This time,
the whole audience burst out in loud guffaws. It turned out that the third
person was internally famous for asking ridiculous questions and I had timed my comment just
perfectly. However, I didn’t get the job. Perhaps my flippant comments were the
reason or perhaps it reflected the search committee’s chair’s first words to me
I don’t even know why we are interviewing
you, you are totally unsuitable for the position. In fact, knowing that I
wasn’t going to get the position was perhaps one reason I felt emboldened to
say what was on my mind.

As a related point, make sure to leave room for
questions at the end – your talk should only be about 45 minutes but not much
shorter. During questions, make sure you respond at length and with
deliberation. (Don’t just say Yes, you
are right and then move on to the next question.) If the question doesn’t make sense, say something like OK, I am not sure precisely what you mean –
I look forward to discussing it more with you later over beers – but I will for the moment convert
your question into one that I can actually answer. A response like this is
often good for a chuckle, which again makes you seem fun and engaging.

One problem that I might have introduced with all of the
above advice is that you will begin to overthink everything during the
interview when you really should be relaxed. So here is a more general suggestion
that hopefully facilitates all of the above my more organically. When you go for the interview, pretend that you are already a faculty member at University X and that you
have been invited to give a seminar at University Y. This mindset will
hopefully help to make all of the above flow more naturally and without conscious
thought DURING the interview.

Any thoughts on how to nail the interview when you're asked to give 2 seminars? The formal seminar you describe above as well as a 'chalk talk' that's specifically about future research plans? What are search committees looking for here?